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Comment by fknorangesite | Hacker News Reader

> you've got this tasty resource

Probably not as tasty as you think. The taste of wild meat can vary pretty heavily depending on what the animal's diet is like, and with something omnivorous like hogs that could be damn near anything. There's a reason we generally only eat herbivores (at least when it comes to mammals).

But even if you do want to eat it, now you've got to just cook the hell out of it unless you want worms. Wild pork is very susceptible to parasites.

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I wonder if meat that doesn’t have boar taint tastes amazing though. I had wild turkey once and it was like another universe of flavor compared to the sad tasteless thing we eat on Thanksgiving. If I recall, I have had wild boar before and it had the same very rich wonderful flavor difference that I experienced in the turkey and is like the difference between a store-bought tomato and a garden one.

And reading this-

https://www.aasv.org/shap/issues/v5n4/v5n4p151.pdf

If you read the “Consumers’ response to taint” section, it seems consumers can’t even detect boar taint in meat, only trained panelists in a lab; so you have a very weird Goodhart’s Law situation going on there.

And especially so in Ukraine, where feral hogs have been known to consume the bodies of dead russian soldiers. You can Google it, I don't want to link to it here...

Totally believable. Is not uncommon for the species to eat carrion when they found it.

Pigs are literally in the top three meats consumed.

Old males meat has a very strong pungent taste. Pigs at the supermarket are either young or castrated to remove the problem. Hunters favor also young boars over the older males (unless the goal is the trophy and in that case the meat could be entirely discarded). Is also a though meat. Some people marinate wildboar meat for a few days before cooking it to tenderize it.

You got to cook it in a pressure cooker, that’s how people in South Asia do it. Turns out super tender and isn’t gamey.

…that is: raised pigs of selected breeds, and more importantly: almost never uncastrated males, as their meat tends to have a bad taste (so-called boar taint, see link below) that makes it unsellable. That's why the overwhelming majority of raised-for-meat male piglets are castrated, so as to not develop that bad boar taint taste, at an age less than 14 days old. A cruel procedure by the way, which is at most places still done without any anesthesia or analgesia (pain relief). With feral pigs of course, none of that happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint

Not wild ones.

And it's easily within living memory that even farmed pigs were always cooked well-done because of the parasite issue.

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